Hacker News Reader

Comment by euiee | Hacker News Reader

Yup we already knew this.

Google had many engineers working on a) failed projects b) people being paid to sit around.

There seems to be this strange belief on here that making something more accessible to everyone will always result in better outcomes. I don’t see this being true of software.

I’m very pro-tech. But nobody can point me to a product built by someone outside of the large tech firms, made by by llm’s that is a great value add to one’s life. Many of those were already created - they’re on the apple App Store for example.

I’m absolutely confident coding speed is irrelevant. A person who has a real vision + strategy and hand written code will beat the team with no vision, strategy and code blasted out by llm’s.

Sure llm’s could augment the former - but you’re missing the point!!

View on HN

> A person who has a real vision + strategy and hand written code will beat the team with no vision, strategy and code blasted out by llm’s.

But you have to beat the team with vision + strategy who is also blasting out code with LLMs.

Certainly, the time it takes to figure out that an idea is bad had been shortened :)

If the time taken is shortened but you don't learn anything from it, then you're still behind.

Actually you're not just behind, you've burned up money.. you've destroyed value - there's an opportunity cost of that money. Whilst the other competitor who is prudent eventually wins will be far more attractive in the eyes of investors - moreover once you are confident you can scale up inputs (engineers) and hone in the quality whilst the other competitor runs ragged with a half-baked product.

We've seen this story play out already numerous times: Apple. They made a mis-step with Apple Intelligence but aside from that, they've been right not to lurch to deep into things they shouldnt. Its not zero-sum.

There's a difference between vibe coded slop, vibe coded kinda slop built by an engineer, AI assisted engineers, and AI planning. I enjoy writing code by hand but it's quickly becoming apparent that LLMs are now a tool that one should be using in some capacity.

Nobody writes code in notepad anymore, even though you could and might even like all the black text.

I'm fairly pessimistic about LLMs, but I do find they're a good research tool. If I can accelerate finding answers amid the slurry of Confluence, Slack, assorted other intranet places and the web, I can get back to thinking about the design and programming.

I have a user CLAUDE.md that tells it not to presume to modify any files, and a bunch of internal MCPs for our logging and monitoring tools, documents, git repositories and such, and I've been dabbling with writing skill files so it can access some other internal things.

So I can basically say "this thing isn't working because x, and it's probably related to y not having z" and it'll go off and find info buried in the corporate abyss.

Then other people yeet wildly awful LLM generated PRs over the fence and I lose my sanity from basically having fight a constant battle against a slow rot of software quality that will bite us later.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com